Physics becomes entertainment at Fermilab

Brian Nord, a post-doctoral researcher at Fermilab, gave a "Colbert Report"-like newscast for his physics presentation. (Cindy Arnold, Fermilab)

Give five physicists 10 minutes to talk about their research as if they were a detective, Elvis or Stephen Colbert and you might regret sleeping through high school physics class all those years ago.

At the second annual Physics Slam last month, five particle physicists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory were challenged to explain a complex physics concept to an audience of 850 people of all ages in the most exciting and clear way possible. The participants were chosen by the lab's auditorium committee, which regularly holds events for the public on the lab's campus in Batavia.

As in a Poetry Slam, the audience chose the winners, and the physicists with the loudest applause won.

There were no rules for the competition — a point post-doctoral researcher Brian Nord said he took literally in planning his "Colbert Report" spinoff: "The Cosmic Nightly News — A Day in the Life of the Universe."

Reporting from his studio in the year 3031, Nord, one of two winners of the slam, gave the audience a snapshot of what physicists know about the concept of dark energy with a host of jokes, visuals and a Slinky.

"I'm trying to get across just a few things about how we figured out that dark energy exists and what we know about it," Nord said. "Let's be honest, I wanted to write jokes for a week."

Other participants took a different approach to what some called one of the most difficult presentations they've ever given.

Post-doctoral researcher Tia Miceli posed as a detective investigating "cases" involving the elusive neutrino, a very light particle that is electronically neutral and difficult to detect. Chris Polly, project manager for Fermilab's Muon g-2 experiment, called the muon — a rare kind of particle that lasts just 2.2 millionths of a second — the "Elvis of the subatomic world," and dressed up as "The King" himself.

"It is impossible to say anything in 10 minutes," said Hugh Lippincott, a post-doctoral researcher who studies dark matter.

Dark matter, Lippincott said, is the "glue in the galaxy that brought everything together" and is thought to account for a large part of mass that is unknown and unseen in the universe.

"We believe it's around all the time. We just don't know what it is," he said. "We're trying to directly detect the stuff and to do that you build a very sensitive radiation detector and you put it in as quiet a place as possible and see what happens."

During his presentation, Lippincott mimicked for the audience an experiment he conducts in a mine about a mile and a quarter underground in northern Ontario by asking the audience to clap their hands if they fit into a series of categories. Eventually, only one person dressed as the book character Waldo clapped her hands.

"All of the effort is to get rid of this background and isolate the signal you're looking for so in my presentation," he said. "We're trying to find a signal in the audience by getting rid of the background slowly."

At the end of the slam, audience members asked the physicists questions about their research and the study of physics in general.

Ten-year-old Nicolas Amat, of Geneva, stumped the experts when he asked how the Big Bang Theory came to be.

Amat said after the show that he found the presentations to be both informative and funny.

"I thought I was going to be falling asleep," he joked. "I like science. I want to be a physicist some day."

And that's a dream that Miceli said she hopes more girls will share, noting that once you learn the terms physicists use to talk about the universe, it's really simple to understand.

"Physics just seems complicated because we have all of these specialized terms," said Miceli, who tied for first place at the slam. "It's actually not that hard. The hard part is just learning all of the language and all of the school that you have to go to."